During the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programme vastly expanded the reach and size of the federal government in combating the Great Depression through ‘relief, reform, and recovery’. The public works projects undertaken by a host of new agencies, most notably the Public Works Administration (PWA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), constituted its most direct assault on unemployment. Between 1933 and 1939 over two-thirds of federal emergency expenditures went toward funding these construction enterprises. The PWA focused on financing huge projects, like New York City's Triborough Bridge and the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state, constructed by private firms. In contrast, the WPA directly employed unskilled relief labour to build smaller projects that included 480 airports, 78,000 bridges and nearly 40,000 public buildings.

According to historian Robert Leighninger, the New Deal's public works agencies

As this observation implies, Hollywood cinema of the 1930s made little to no effort to implant these material and architectural representations of expanded federal governance in the nation's conscience. Instead, it repeatedly chose to put on display the national monuments and public buildings of Washington, DC. Rather than celebrate federal constructions that had sprouted across the nation in such a short time, Hollywood focused on recognisable and venerable institutions to symbolise the new relationship between the citizen and the national government.

Three films in particular used iconic public buildings as more than just settings for unrelated action: Gregory La Cava's Gabriel over the White House (Cosmopolitan/MGM, 1933), Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Columbia, 1939) and George Stevens’ The Talk of the Town (Columbia, 1942). In these three films, the public edifices of the three branches of the US government – executive, legislative and judicial – become places of personal transformations, as the three male protagonists each experience private realisations that help them take on new public roles as, respectively, president, senator and Supreme Court justice.